Posts from 17 February 2015

Continuing on the idea of identity, I'm starting to think that in any practice as personal as job hunting, it's tremendously challenging to disassociate yourself from the process of searching. Meaning, largely, that you're never not looking for work for yourself, you're always thinking about what you'll be growing into in the (near) future when you're looking for work.

Perhaps the key, especially for someone as identity-sensitive as I am, is to pretend that you're looking for the sake of someone else. I can give good advice to others, and I know what I should be doing, but thus far I've been terrible at following through.

I can't imagine myself at a lot of these places, but I have to credit that at least partially to my lack of imagination.

In the meantime, I think my goal until I run out of ramen is to pretend that everything is about someone else, and that I've just been employed by this person to do the legwork of a hard-core job search, and that they're the one who is living in terror.

I have the easiest time not being a perfectionist when I'm working on something that I don't care about.

I think this is an extension of my thinking about identity. I identify strongly with my work, more specifically my work output, and when I don't feel that my work on things that I identify with is good enough I get tetchy.

Meanwhile, I can recognize a finished product, and get my work there much more easily, when the topic isn't something I have strong opinions about.